Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : nameserver setup

[jaf]

In need of some help and advice please..

To achive..
I would like to setup a server(s) to act as nameservers for our hosting network. The nameservers will control around 300 domains and growing.

Current setup..
We have a rack in a london datacentre.
We have 4 servers installed atm. 1x mail server (NT4), 1x sql server (NT4), 1x webserver (w2k3 web), 1x customer server (w2k3 web)
I plan to upgrade all servers to win 2003.
I have a new server waiting to be installed. This will be the nameserver. It currently has a new install of win2003 standard server.
Each server has two external IP's (as well as an internal IP on our local network)

Questions..
What software do I use to create the nameserver?
Do I use Microsoft DNS Server?
Is there better software that I can use on this windows 2003 server?
How easy to setup zonefiles?
Do I use the one server for ns1 and ns2? Can i do this?
(will use 2 seperate servers in the long run)
I would ideally like a web based panel to control and edit the zonefiles for each domain for each customer.

Any help please?

Thanks

Melvin

[jsw6]

I haven't used the Windows DNS server since 1997, but it sucked then; and my guess is it sucks now for all the same reasons. Hard to remotely administer, impossible to script, bad GUI mechanism for maintaining RRs, and in 1997 it was really unstable. I imagine the instability issue has been fixed by now, but the others are pretty much design intent, aren't they?

In my opinion, you'd be better off having your ISP do authoratitive DNS for you (which they are usually happy to do for free), out-sourcing to a DNS specialty shop, or running a unix operating system for authoratitive DNS.

Operating a web interface to maintain RRs would be hard or impossible with the ISP doing it; maybe possible with a DNS specialty shop; and definately possible with unix-based name servers.

[M4tth3wV]

If you choose the *nix route, check out the projects at sourceforge for managing DNS via web interface.

OT,, do Windows workstations still try to register themselves with root servers ?!

[Layerblue]

Microsoft DNS works just fine in most cases, especially on the 2003 platform. If you want added reliability/flexibility take a look at Simple DNS Plus at http://www.jhsoft.com